How to create special blocks

[Bruno Bronosky]

I'd like to hear how people have managed to create [working] special blocks including but not limited to:

Doors (at least 2 blocks high)

Signs (with text and oriented in a desired direction)

Torches (attached to the desired face of a block)

[Alexander Pruss]

Doors and torches: You need to look up the meta field for getting the directions right. Google: minecraft block ids. For doors, you also need to create the bottom half before the upper half, and for torches you need to create the block you're attaching to first.

Sign text: On RaspberryJamMod for Forge and Minecraft 1.8, you can use setBlockWithNBT() and a correct NBT argument. The best way to find out the correct argument is to place a sign manually and read its data with getBlockWithNBT(). You can't manipulate sign text on other implementations of the API. The same method works for all block types.